The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 42 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Managers should encourage employees to leave Slack once they outgrow it
“And here's a controversial one. There's times we spent a year. I'm like, you don't need to be here anymore. You have learned everything that you're going to learn here at Slack. It's time to go somewhere else. And I wouldn't say it like that, but there's truly…”
Amin: Clay drove growth by forcing all customer support into public Slack
“Eventually the way that we got a ton of customers was actually by cutting off all of the different ways that we supported customers.
So we basically pushed all of our customers into the same channel.
So anyone that would sign up to Clay, we would say, join our…”
Dropbox and Slack's enterprise value came from securitizing rogue employee usage
“And so Dropbox and Slack, if you ask me what's the company value, well, the company value was securitizing, in a way, the bottoms-up problem that we created for them, which is all this rogue usage.”
Kanter: Most buyers won't pay more for software beyond 80% quality
“The reality is that most people don't care about the product only being 80% as good. For most people that doesn't matter. They're not willing to pay a lot more for that incremental, incremental piece.”
ChatGPT succeeded partly by remaining a standalone product outside core workflows
“And when you look at ChatGPT, I think partly why it's been successful is that it's such a standalone product that's not integrated into anything else. And I think if it actually was integrated into your Slack or into your email or into your work, I think peopl…”
Kracov: Dock avoids Slack communities because the marketing arbitrage has decayed
“A lot of these things go out of style and like a doc, I'm not starting a Slack community. There are way too many of them. They get noisy. It's hard to scale. There's still value and I'm sure some people can still make it successful, but for me, I just don't th…”
Weiss: Data solves easy product problems, but big swings require intuition
“What we used to actually say early on was, you know, data can help solve easy problems, but doesn't actually solve the hard problems. And hard problems are ones where you can't actually just experiment your way, you know, down incremental paths. You actually h…”
Weiss: PLG companies expanding to enterprise shouldn't start with outbound BDRs
“Starting off with building out a huge BDR team to do inside sales for cold leads feels like If you already had a product-led growth motion, not the right place to begin. Because I think, without a doubt, the best leads aren't ones that you cold emailed or that…”
Weiss: Product founder CEOs should follow a U-shaped involvement model
“If you think about like a major product initiative, not an experiment, but something more significant, that's like this big kind of bet. And you think about the X axis is kind of the time that goes on from the project starting to maybe launch. And the Y axis i…”
Weiss: Product managers acting like "mini-CEOs" alienate their teams
“I will tell you that people who take the approach of being a mini CEO for a team are the ones who their teams wind up saying, why do we have to have a product manager on our team? Can't we do it without them? Because, you know, you can wind up accidentally bei…”
Asthana followed Stewart Butterfield's advice to take capital available on good terms
“I heard Stuart Butterfield from Slack say it at a conference that, you know, if the money is available on good terms, you just take it. And the money was available and on good terms. So I took it and it allowed us to invest.”
Abraham: Reducto operates fully in person without daily one-on-ones or long write-ups
“We don't do daily one-on-ones. We don't have sort of like extensive write-ups for the work that we're doing for the sake of showing that it's a lot of work. The way that we approach product building is we have a channel on Slack called Daily Updates where ever…”
Public experiment betting by leadership models the humility required for growth
“I encourage teams to Post an experiment in Slack and get everyone to vote on which one they think is going to be the winner and let the founder and the head of products and the head of growth be very public about their bets. And then they're going to be wrong …”
Asana had 5% company penetration compared to Dropbox and Slack's 30%
“We didn't have the dynamic that Dropbox and Slack had where you have 30% of a company using it, especially when you go outside of the big tech companies. And so, A lot of times it would be like five percent of employee base”
Larson: Important disagreements with shared context must be debated live, not asynchronously
“Talking things through live when people do have the shared like context, they just disagree is incredibly valuable and it's almost impossible to kind of like get to the end of these things on like a chat on Slack or something. You really do have to like talk i…”
Zima: Omni supports third-party software in Slack to build trust
“If someone wants me to help them write SQL, or like, I don't know, debug something in Excel, like I'll go do something I do support for other people's products in Slack, because I just think it shows like a positive association with how much we care about thei…”
Zima: Sub-minute support response times drive massive customer dialogue
“You will be surprised at the difference in the conversation when you respond in one second versus one minute versus 10 minutes. Because when someone asks a question and you respond in 1:02, it immediately turns into a conversation. And It is very likely that y…”
Kracov: VIP-only communities fail because early-career members drive conversation
“We first started the Slack community trying to go after VPs of HR and we were like, let's make it a VIP community. And it fell flat, like no conversation, nothing happened. But once we sort of broadened it up to sort of more all HR people, what we found is peo…”
Weiss: Company strategy presentations are forgotten within a month without repetition
“If you can keep an organization aligned and focused, it's like a superpower for velocity, but alignment isn't static. You don't get to do it once. I mean, this is even if you, like, present a three-year company strategy. If you don't talk about it over the nex…”
Weiss: Slack avoids endless debates by quickly prototyping functional software
“Prototype the path, which gets into how we at least approach a lot of what we do by not getting stuck in long product debates or endless design reviews, but actually figuring out what's the fastest path to being able to actually touch the software with your ow…”
Weiss: Target accounts with organic adoption to maximize AE productivity
“I'll tell you the best way to ramp that up is by making sure that those AEs are only talking to companies where there's already a lot of traction without ever needing a person to help them”
Weiss: Slack historically underpriced its product by prioritizing value creation
“I think Slack maybe, I think historically probably has underpriced the product versus the value we've created for customers. Part of that I think is one of our maxims from the very early days is we focus on value creation, not value extraction.”
Weiss: Scaling Orgs Slow Down Due to Consensus Decision Bottlenecks
“Most of the reasons why you're moving slower is because decisions start grinding to a halt. You have a consensus based kind of model. Everyone gets a voice. You don't have a framework for how you actually get to resolution.”
Weiss: Product Teams Should Hire PMs with Distinct Spikes, Not Generalists
“No one person we hire looks like a perfect sphere. Right? So what we look for actually is people who have clear spikes on one or two of those axes, and also is well-rounded, but what are their superpowers? It's one of the things we talk about when we bring som…”
Weiss: Slack reached $80M-$90M ARR before hiring a sales head
“I think we got to,
I want to say, 80 or ninety million dollars in ARR before we hired a head of sales.”
Weiss: Salesforce is pound-for-pound the world's best enterprise sales machine
“In some ways, to your point, that kind of premise, if you will, of the acquisition was, if you can take the company that pound for pound is probably the absolute best at enterprise sales and marketing in the world, as in Salesforce, and you can take the compan…”
Weiss: Bottom-up product strategy fails when executive buyers do not use software
“And so I think that's probably if I was going to delineate is figuring out this approach works best when we actually have an alignment between the end users and the people who at least can make the initial purchase decision and definitely works the worst if yo…”
Weiss: Multi-year product bets must be decomposed into sequential public milestones
“For any one of our large product areas, a lot of what we talk about when we're making big new investments is you have this grand vision. Okay. We're probably not going to spend the next five years building this out and then ship it and see do customers like it…”
Weiss: Slack leans 75% on data for small features, 75% on taste for big bets
“Here's what I would say is, of smaller feature work, I would say it's probably 75% data-driven, where we'll actually run an experiment or run a release with a holdback. For larger, bolder, new features that are net-new capabilities, I would say it's maybe the …”
Weiss: 85% of Slack Enterprise Deals at IPO Originated from Self-Service
“I don't know what the latest set is, but I know when we went public, we had a sat, I think it was 85% of our enterprise deals by the time we went Public at our IPO had started off as paid customers through self-service, meaning that they literally got to the p…”
Weiss estimates Slack's product portfolio allocation is roughly 60-35-5
“Across the board, I would say we probably look, my hunch that I haven't actually, like, actually done the math on it, is we probably look a little bit more, like, 60, 35, five, if you will. Not quite as many fully speculative things, but maybe focus a little b…”
Weiss: Slack scales founder product intuition via principles and 3-year strategy
“So the first is really just about making sure that we have everyone really aligned and energized around our mission, our vision, and our kind of what we call our three-year strategy internally. So that's kind of what people are aligned at a high level. But the…”
Copplestone: Supabase ingests all communications and meetings into searchable AI warehouses
“Our attrition is extremely low, but the leaning into the async culture has helped because everything's written, everything's recorded, everything's captured in Slack or Notion, or one of our sales meetings is ingested into our warehouses, and this kind of solv…”
Stauch: Serval's demo only clicks when showing the workflow builder
“The demo can be kind of broken up into everything that comes before showing the workflow builder and then everything that comes after, because before you show the workflow builder, people are bored and everything you show them, they think they've seen before. …”
fal maintains roughly 500 shared Slack channels with customer engineering teams
“We have, I don't know, 500 different Slack channels with all the engineers from companies we work with. And the response rate of those Slack channels, you measure that daily and like we obsess over that.”
GitLab's CFO shares roadshow investor sentiment with all employees via Slack
“This is the first company where I actually know everything after we do an earnings call and our windows open and our CFO goes on the roadshow. I understand what they're saying and not just me. He sends out a slack to the entire company of the sentiment, the ov…”
Weiss: Salesforce treats marketing messaging like iterative product prototyping
“They approach marketing in an iterative prototype driven way, the way that we've always approached products.”
Weiss: Slack's PLG Team Launches 95% of Features as Experiments
“We have a team that's focused on more of the self-service business, this new user, new team journey, product-led growth. That team I would say, 95% of what they launch as an experiment. It's incredibly data-driven.”
Weiss: 77 of the Fortune 100 use Slack
“77 of the Fortune 100 use Slack, and probably a hundred of them are Salesforce customers.”
Slack is developing a brand new UI and navigation design
“We're working on an entirely new kind of user interface and visual design navigation for Slack.”